If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it

Yesterday, our own David Riordan observed some interesting changes in the App Store rankings for Yuchao Zhou’s Units Converter app. Recall that when the app changed status from free to being paid-for, it shot to the top of the paid rankings list, perhaps due to the inherited number of downloads from its tenure as a free app.

Whatever the reasons, this morning we woke up to see another change that may be related. The App Store now provides an overall combined ranking for free and paid-for apps. To me, this is a step closer to showing the (somewhat) net effect of number of downloads on rankings. I’ll save my breath on pining for the regular release of download info, and instead ask for your feedback on another observation.

Where’s Units Converter today?

In the new, combined overall ranking, it is ranked #52, and shows as the highest ranked paid-for app in the list. Apple’s Texas Hold’em appears as the next paid-for app on the list. However, if you click into the “Top Paid Apps” view and sort by popularity, Texas Hold’em appears at the top of the list, and Units Converter is not to be found there nor in the free apps view.

What would be particularly useful to all of us in the apps ecosystem, and in my opinion, not very harmful to the commercial interests of Apple or developers, is for Apple to publish the method used to determine how rankings are calculated. Our friends at Tapulous write the wildly popular Tap Tap Revenge, which to date has somewhere in the range of 1 million downloads. Their app shot quickly to the top of the charts but has slowly moved down in rank despite likely having more downloads in aggregate than other apps that now outrank it.

Forgive me for sounding trite, but as the saying goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In prior lives, whether I’ve been writing proposals, term papers, selling widgets, or being evaluated by brokers, vendors, managers, etc., I’ve always known the criteria by which I’m being measured.

One of our goals here at Medialets is to provide transparency on the industry to help us all understand what’s happening during this formative stage of the market. If anyone out there knows any more about our observations on the App Store today, or has an opinion on disclosure of rankings methods, we’d love to hear from you.

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